Injured in last year's season opener, the Patriots quarterback informs the magazine that he hopes to play the game for another decade.

Glen Farley

His team's postseason hopes in the same condition his left knee had been in five months earlier — mangled — it seems that Tom Brady still spent this past Super Bowl Sunday the same way he’s spent so many others during the course of his NFL career.

He spent it playing football.

Awakening at home in Southern California this past Feb. 1, the New England Patriots quarterback told Sports Illustrated’s Peter King that he called Neal S. ElAttrache, the orthopedic surgeon who performed the Oct. 6 surgery to mend his wounded left knee, and a few friends and headed out to play on a field at UCLA.

“Running, jumping, throwing – it felt so good,” Brady told King in the cover story of the June 1 edition of SI. “Throwing never was a problem. I’ve really felt comfortable throwing since two months after surgery.”

As caught on camera by ESPN prior to Monday’s NCAA Div. 1 lacrosse championship game between Syracuse and Cornell at Gillette Stadium, Brady has been throwing in Foxboro this week.

On Tuesday, Brady, who tore the anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments in his knee when hit by the Chiefs’ Bernard Pollard on a safety blitz midway through the first quarter of last year's Sept. 7 season opener at Gillette, participated in the Patriots’ first of four straight days of full-squad organized team activities.

The mass media should get to see Brady going through his paces first hand on Thursday when it is allowed to watch that portion of the OTAs.

Of most interest to Patriots fans in King’s piece, which has been posted on the Web site SI.com:

King reports that Brady said he is experiencing no aftereffects from the surgery or two follow-up procedures to clean a post-operative staph infection in the knee and quotes the quarterback as saying that playing 10 more seasons “is a big goal of mine, a very big goal. I want to play until I'm 41. And if I get to that point and still feel good, I’ll keep playing. I mean, what the hell else am I going to do? I don’t like anything else.

“People say, ‘What will you do if you don't play football?’ Why would I even think of doing anything else? What would I do instead of run out in front of 80,000 people and command 52 guys and be around guys I consider brothers and be one of the real gladiators? Why would I ever want to do anything else? It’s so hard to think of anything that would match what I do: Fly to the moon? Jump out of planes? Bungee-jump off cliffs? None of that (bleep) matters to me. I want to play this game I love, be with my wife and son, and enjoy life.”

Brady told King that he’s “as confident as anyone could be that I’ll be ready to play, back to playing normally, when the seasons starts” and said as of now “there’s nothing I can’t do.”

Brady said that he was to blame for the problems that ensued following surgery — King reports it as a hematoma and the staph infection — because he went against doctor’s orders to stay off the leg by putting his son, Jack, on his shoulder and moving around his hospital room, playing with his son.

“I wanted to prove I could move around and get ahead of schedule and nothing was going to stop me,” Brady told King. “Unfortunately, I did too much too soon. I was responsible for the infection. In a way it was probably good for me — it slowed me down a little bit.”

Brady said his absence on game days was, in large part, head coach Bill Belichick’s call.

“Coach Belichick didn't want me on the sidelines for the game,” Brady told King. “He told me, ‘Every time we’d throw an incompletion the camera would go to you on the sideline, and we don't need that.’ And I didn’t want to watch from a (luxury) box.”

On a social note, Brady, who was married to supermodel Gisele Bundchen in a small wedding ceremony in Santa Monica, Calif., on Feb. 26, said that reports that bodyguards for him and wife shot at the car of photographers who showed up in Costa Rica for a larger ceremony on April 4 were completely false.

“We found two guys on our property, and we told them to get out,” Brady told King. “Our security guys didn’t even have guns. There were no shots fired.”

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